Clay damascus..

[RainsFire]

heh fellas, I was just looking through the new blueprints and noticed the clay one..and remembered something my mother does for fun. Using polymer clay she would make "mosaic" patterns, following me? There are dozens of tutorials and sites with step by step instructions on how to get these delicate patterns, and the clay because it is wax or poloymer based never dries up.
last night I was experimenting with two different shades of grey (alloy's of steel) and got a nice latter pattern, and experimented with some various other basic patterns.

what I'm getting at is this is a great way to model damascus steels without filling up a scrap bin.. to the point of if you end up with a crappy pattern, you can knead it together until it becomes "homogenous" (all the same color) and use it with another different shade.

so ya, good times.. have fun, and maybe someone wants to make this a blueprint some time.

[Paragon]

I was just looking at the clay forgin BP. This is a great application for it.

[ApprenticeMan]

Yeah people have been using clay like that for a long time, nothing new.

[RainsFire]

like what?

[Tyler Murch]

For pattern developement in pattern welded steel. I know how a ladder pattern is made, and I am curious as to how you performed the material removal cleanly in clay. Care to share?

[Glenn]

Any of the tools used in working with sculpture clay can be used. A ladies hair pin will cut a grove in clay. Your a blacksmith, you can make any tool you need (grin).

Rains, the folks from Oz were discussing that very topic (damascus clay) last night in the chat room. Several good ideas were thrown into the conversation.

[RainsFire]

cool, guess someone else was thinking along the same lines.
yep, for material removal I just used whatever I had on hand.. we are also into working with ceramic clay's so we have all those tools, including an elongated razorblade type thing I used for acchieving flat "grinds"
I have a picture of the little pattern'd clay blade I made that I'll post up if I ever find the sneaky cord..

I just realized you can do exact calculations for making a blade down to the very fraction of an inch for calculating waste, expansion, end deminsions of said blade style per ammount of clay.. ect. and ya I've been messing with it for a while longer.

It'd be cool to be able to show somone a baked finished billet of said pattern so they could see either for reference or some other purpose how the blade would look when completed.

you could set up several example peices with different patterns purely for your own reference as well.
the possibilities are really fairly endless.
cool stuff..
-Merry christmas eve yall!